My take on remembrance days is that I would like to pay respects to all people who died in wars. Ultimately war is futile and these people died for no good reason. We should remember this on these days and hope that this keeps us from killing others in the same ways. (It doesn’t, but I can hope)

Excusable, sometimes. Justified, 1 in a million. Commendable, never.
Those sign up for the military, forfeit their humanity.
And they deserve neither praise nor respect.
For when they kill, they do not kill when it is excusable, nor when it is justified. They kill when hey are told by their masters to do so.
They are killers for hire, nothing more.

@FireMadeFlesh I don’t want to be rude, but actually, I don’t live in Australia, so I don’t know the meaning of that day. Beside, I am already busy celebrating another day for fallen soldiers in my country.

@ragingloli I will revisit those comments when I have more time. But imagine, if you will, what would’ve been if “killers for hire” never enabled their leaders to force King John to sign the Magna Carta.

@ragingloli – I agree that war is unnecessary and wrong. But I have a huge amount of respect for those who sacrifice their lives to keep aggressors out of where they don’t belong. Do you suggest that a country should just sit back and let aggressors take over without putting up resistance? You’re entitled to your opinion of course.@Mimishu1995 – you may not understand the significance like we do, but I gave you the link so you could find out! Of course, you have your own day- fair enough.

@ragingloli Horsesh*t. In what way would the world be better off, if an oppressive tyrant of a king went unchecked? The very laws that allow you to sit in your miserable chair and criticise what you don’t understand in perfect safety were built on the backs of men who died for freedom of speech and emancipation of the common people.

@Mimishu1995 I left because I had to go to work. This isn’t something I’d let slide. And thanks for the tip on our deluded friend here.

I started to answer this question last night, but started crying. I lived in NZ for 15 years. My father served in WW2 and my father lost all his Uncles in WW1. Some of the answers here truly hurt my heart. Part of remembering those who fell isn’t the glorification of the violence death and destruction, it is remembering how many we lost and really counting the cost. If we can’t remember our history for what it really was, we will keep making the same mistakes and we will keep killing each others children, fathers, sons.

The thing is, those oppressive tyrants, kings and people’s leaders are all put into power by a wealthy elite who creates all the tension to force countries to war with one another.

The capitalists of the West enriched the rising stars of Communism way back with the Revolution in Russia. They offered millions to Lenin and Trotsky and let em duke it out.
Trotsky lost, ran away to Mexico, the rest is history.

I also sorrow for those run over by the steam roller of War, but rest assured, those of us who fought them had no real need to be fighting as they are artificially started (mostly by the US in the last 100 years or more [see Gulf of Tonkin; also see Pearl Harbor, subsection sneak attack known in advance by US]).

These wars are being fought lately to steal oil, poppies and the cola nut. Also to enrich war profiteers like arms manufacturers, arms dealers, arms users.
They are also being fought to kill off people. Yes, it’s a sad thing when the governments of the world conspire to kill off hundreds of thousands of combatants yearly in a vain attempt at population control. (They also use medicine [see flu shots] and science to create bio weapons which are used on the population [see AIDs] and they use the food manufacturers to grow…poisonous foods [see GMOs as in no mo GMO])

@Dan_Lyons I agree to an extent. The executive in most countries is corrupt, and unfortunately many wars are started for economic reasons. It is no coincidence that US construction companies won most of the tenders to rebuild Iraq, with US government loans that will cripple Iraq’s economy for years to come. It is unspeakably sad that the hawks are circling on the Iran issue, and it appears voices of reason have only delayed that war.

However, there have been wars throughout history that have been fought for noble purposes. Between them, the two world wars essentially ended the concept of a war of expansion. Very few countries can get away with attacking another country purely for resources or land gains in our modern world. When the US does it, they can’t get away with annexing the region in question, so they have to resort to a proxy government. A few hundred years ago, people would’ve simply said “bad luck” if Germany invaded Poland.

No one is saying that we should support the politicians and power brokers who start the wars. No one is saying that all wars are just, and the idea of going to war is praiseworthy. That simply isn’t true. But that shouldn’t stop us showing support and encouragement to the soldiers who fight those wars, or showing appreciation for the freedoms bought through the wars that were in fact noble. I don’t believe Australia should’ve ever been involved in the recent Iraq or Afghanistan conflicts, but I still respect the soldiers who fought there, and believe they are worthy of honour.

I must also dispute your population control idea. If governments wanted to control the population, there would be nothing easier than dumping a few hundred grams of ricin in key water supplies. The fact is, modern economics relies on population growth. Population control is the last thing on government’s minds, however much our overpopulation destroys the environment.

Britain would have brought in the full force of the north american colonies from the beginning, and would not have had to wait until Pearl Harbour.
The war would have been much shorter, countless lives would have been saved.
Let us go further.
One of the biggest factors of the Nazi’s rise to power was the colonial caused Great Depression. Under control of the British empire, that could have been avoided, preventing sufficient public support for the nazis. WW2 could have been prevented entirely, saving millions of lives. Without WW2, the soviet union, if it ever came to exist, would not have seen the need to become a world super power, preventing the cold war, and thus all the proxy wars that resulted from it. Millions of lives saved.
Oh, and slavery would have been abolished much earlier, too, and you would have legalised gay marriage nationwide by now.
So yes, with out the treasonous rebellion by the colonies and the resulting thug state, the world would be a better place today.

@ragingloli That interpretation of history is so chronologically and conceptually messed up I have no idea where to begin. But the example I raised was the war leading to the signing of the Magna Carta. This is the origin of the rule of law in the modern world (medieval Europe had forgotten the Code of Hammurabi, and the Greek and Roman polities). Without rule of law, any monarch or feudal lord could decree as they desired, including conscripting their subjects into wars of aggression. It is the rule of law that makes the executive answerable to the masses, which is what makes war such an unpalatable proposition in our modern society. It was a war that helped prevent future wars. Surely you can’t withhold respect from those men?

Indeed it was the Magna Carta which began once again the process of Authori tay guaranteeing certain basic rights and individual(s)’ freedom(s).

This leads to a couple of more documents written by those in Authori tay ; The declaration of Independence and the US Constitution.

But you see @FireMadeFlesh these documents and more importantly the freedoms they guarantee in writing should not be necessary. We should be living our lives according to these fundamental principles without anyone stepping on them or abrogating them.

You speak of “noble” reasons wars have been perpetrated. And then you mention WWII. But as @ragingloli noted, the bad colonials caused the Great Depression thus opening the door to incredible growth by well funded despots.
What loli fails to mention is that the Nazi party was funded by big-money interests in Europe (England) and the US. So we funded the rise to power this group of criminally insane drug addicts and then had to scramble like hell to end his reign of terror.

And so as you view history with a more jaundiced eye, you may begin to see the pattern of reality that most wars are completely unnecessary, generally being caused by war profiteers and their bought and paid for political henchmen.

@Dan_Lyons none of that matters on days of remembrance. You miss the point completely. In fact, the war machine makes the loss of men even worse because it isn’t a machine that is wasted on those battlefields. Blood of men and women are spilled and THAT is what we have to remember.

@Dan_Lyons On the contrary, written guarantees of freedoms are very much necessary. A country is, at its core, a monopoly on violence. But the domain within which it is given the mandate to exercise its violence must be clearly defined, if it is to stick to the intended goal. See this article for more on violence.

It is quite a stretch of imagination to think that the “colonials” you blame for the Great Depression knew that it would cause another world war. And if they didn’t know it was coming, it couldn’t be averted. Therefore militarily halting the incursions of the Axis powers was necessary, just, and honourable. But let’s say they did know it was coming, and caused the war for the sake of profits within the military-industrial complex (as is likely the case in certain more recent wars). Surely that only shifts the target of required military action, and not the moral status of action? Surely that indicates that action against these profiteering war-mongers is a worthy ideal? Or do you think that they will simply stop what they are doing and retire to a house in the country when they are exposed?

But of course this is all beside the point. Remembering the dead and wounded has nothing to do with the political aspects of war. It is about showing support and respect for those who fought the wars.

@FireMadeFlesh Sure sure, rule by Machiavellian means. And yet as we now personally know, no more stable than my scenario which we don’t yet know if it is as unstable as you claim because the morons won’t let us try to live that way.